We mentioned last year that although social media can predict many things, it can’t predict the outcome of an event when the people polled have no influence whatsoever. So, no – Twitter can’t predict who will win, but it can tell us who should win.

And this sentiment analysis tracker from Topsy is a bit different from others that have come before it, so it’s worth a look regardless.

Topsy and Twitter released the Twitter Oscar’s Index today. It’s a daily measurement of Twitter users’ Oscar feelings by tracking and measuring the ebb and flow of Oscar-related Twitter conversations.

The index will show the favorites spanning the six biggest categories of the night: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Director – and it’s updated daily to reflect ongoing shifts in opinion.

By continuously tracking Twitter activity and evaluating the sentiment of the tweets mentioning each of the nominees – relative to all the tweets being posted – we can calculate and compare daily changes in sentiment for any movie or person. For example, a sentiment score of 86 indicates that tweets about that movie or person are more positive than the tweets about 86 percent of other terms that day.

So what’s different about it? There are TWO measures really instead of one.

Jamie de Guerre, Topsy’s VP of Product tells us that “Topsy measures the sentiment of each individual Tweet without comparing to any others. This is essentially measuring against a ‘set scale’. After all Tweets for the term have been measured, then we compare the overall sentiment to the sentiment of all other terms to come up with the final Topsy Sentiment Score, which is what Twitter uses for their Twindex values.”

Additionally, de Guerre tells us, “Topsy has the advantage that we have all Tweets in an instantly accessible index. This means that while others are only able to measure the sentiment of Tweets in a vacuum, with no relation to other conversation on Twitter, Topsy is able to provide a much more balanced set of scores by comparing the sentiment for the term being evaluated with the sentiment for all other terms mentioned on Twitter that day. So for example, “Coca Cola” has a sentiment score of 62 this morning, which essentially means that the phrase “Coca Cola” was talked about more positively than roughly 62% of all phrases, terms and hashtags mentioned on Twitter in the past day.”

So if you want to know how people REALLY feel about the nominees – or how they feel about anything really on Twitter – check out Topsy!

And feel free to post a shout out for your favorite actor or movie in the comments.